# Ecommerce replatforming

Category: [Relaunch & Migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/relaunch-migration/) › [Types of migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/relaunch-migration/types-of-migration/)

**Ecommerce replatforming** (also called shop migration) is the move of an online store from one commerce platform to another, for example from Magento to Shopify or from one Shopware version to another. For SEO, the main question is whether product, category and content URLs and their rankings carry over.

## Why is replatforming an SEO topic?
Platforms generate their own URL patterns for products, categories, filters and pages. If URLs change, every old URL needs a redirect to its best-matching new URL. Google advises deciding for each URL where it should redirect, and warns against sending everything to the home page. Old URLs can be gathered from sitemaps, server logs, analytics and the shop system.

## What does Google recommend when URLs change?
- Create a mapping from old to new URLs.
- Use server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) and avoid chains. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but Google advises ideally no more than 3 hops and fewer than 5.
- Update canonical tags, hreflang, internal links and the sitemap.
- Keep redirects as long as possible, generally at least one year.
- Plan server capacity, since Google may crawl the new site more heavily for a while.

Google also notes that for small to medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and longer for larger ones. Ranking fluctuations during that time are normal.

## Shop-specific checks

- **Product markup:** Google says Product structured data lets product details such as price, availability and ratings appear in richer ways. After the move, check that the new product pages still output the markup.
- **Filter URLs:** Google notes that faceted navigation creates very large numbers of URLs that crawlers fetch before they can tell they are useless. Its suggested remedies include robots.txt rules, URL fragments and canonicals pointing to the unfiltered page. A new platform often handles filters differently from the old one.
- **Product variants:** For variants such as size or color, Google documents `ProductGroup` markup with `hasVariant` and `variesBy`. Each variant should be directly selectable with a distinct URL. Those variant URLs need a target in the redirect mapping as well.

## Example
A shop changes a product URL from `/produkt/12345-sneaker-rot` to `/shoes/red-sneaker`. The mapping table holds both, and the old URL answers with a 301 to the new one.

## Checklist
- Every old product, category and content URL has a matching target in the URL mapping, not the home page.
- Redirects are server-side (301 or 308) and run without chains, ideally no more than 3 hops.
- Canonical tags, hreflang, internal links and the sitemap point to the new URLs.
- The new product pages still output Product markup, checked in the page source.
- The new platform handles filter URLs in a controlled way, for example with robots.txt rules, URL fragments or canonicals to the unfiltered page.
- Variant URLs are in the mapping, and the ProductGroup markup is present.
- The server can handle the extra crawling from Google.
- The redirects stay in place for at least one year.

## Related terms

- [Website migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-migration/index.md)
- [Domain migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/domain-migration/index.md)
- [HTTP to HTTPS migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/http-to-https-migration/index.md)
- [URL mapping](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/url-mapping/index.md)
- [Redirect mapping](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/redirect-mapping/index.md)
- [301 redirect](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/301-redirect/index.md)
- [Website migration checklist](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-migration-checklist/index.md)
- [Faceted navigation](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/faceted-navigation/index.md)

## Sources

- [Site moves with URL changes – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes)
- [Ecommerce Replatforming: A Complete Guide – Salesforce](https://www.salesforce.com/au/commerce/replatforming-guide/)
- [What is Website Replatforming – Webstacks](https://www.webstacks.com/blog/website-replatforming)
- [Product structured data – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product)
- [Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/faceted-navigation)
- [Product variant structured data (ProductGroup) – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product-variants)

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Last updated: October 8, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/ecommerce-replatforming/